My Street Japan. Day 40.

Up ahead, just to the left, a daily view I rarely stop and attend to. You’ve seen a slice of this already, in the form of the Takeshi Kitano English school ad tucked into the teeny tiny alley to the right of this structure.

I think it’s closed down, but it’s hard to tell. Much of my stretch of this long street is in the waning stages of life. Many structure are, or look abandoned, doors gone to rust, windows boarded up, inhabitants aging, or perhaps passed. Such are the cycles of life, of a street, too. Maybe one day this small pocket within a small island in the world will gentrify, and we’ll see hip shops, and artists and as-yet-unimaginable goodies lining the streets. For now, we witness a state in-between, and wonder about the past, and fantasize about the future, and all of this mind-gazing is made possible by the living relics before us.

The architecture of the past is the seed of a future, even if it will be a future completely reborn.